The Worst of Evils
by Rinne
Summary: A missing girl and a look through Tony’s life. Written for the NCIS ficathon on Livejournal. COMPLETE


Title: The Worst of Evils  
Written for: celticsky for the Livejournal NCIS Ficathon  
Archive: Yes, but ask permission first  
Rating: Teen  
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for up to part way through season 3, probably around 3.04 Silver War  
Genre: Gen  
Pairings: None  
Disclaimer: I do not own anything and am not getting paid  
Prompt: Tony, gen, angst. "I can endure my own despair, but not another's hope."  
Summary: A missing girl and a look through Tony's life.   
Author's Note: Thank you to Cha Oseye Tempest Thrain and kate98 for betaing, particularly at the last minute. The title is taken from the quote: Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Part of this story is loosely based on the case of Daniel Morecombe, who went missing in 2003 in Queensland, Australia.

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He was almost six and a half the first time he realised, but he was too young to understand.

Mom had a baby in her stomach; he was going to have a little brother or sister. When Tony had been told that there was going to be a younger DiNozzo, he'd been slightly disappointed; after all, he barely got any of his parent's time as it was. Add in a baby, and he'd get even less, he'd seen it happen with his friends. He'd rather have a puppy.

But his Mom had been unhappy for quite awhile. She'd tried to hide it, had redecorated the house, but he could see it; she didn't play with him as much now. He'd made extra special care to be quiet around the house, instead of being his normal loud self. That had meant more hours playing quietly in his room, but he wasn't really going to complain about that – after all, he had more toys than anyone else he knew.

Now, that she was going to have a baby, she wasn't unhappy anymore. He'd seen her rubbing her stomach with such a look of happiness on her face that he'd wondered whether she had done the same with him. After all, he was a baby once too. He asked her, and she said that yeah, she did.

He'd caught her and his father talking about how they hoped this time would be different, and he'd wondered whether she'd had a baby in her stomach when she'd been really sick and had to go to the hospital the previous year. They'd told him it would be December before he'd see his baby brother or sister. It was June, so that meant that he'd already have one if she'd had a baby in her stomach before. Johnny Ashcott had said that babies sometimes go to heaven before they were born, though, so maybe she had had one, and it had gone to heaven. She'd gotten sad just after that trip to the hospital.

Tony's father had told him that he had to be extra special careful around his Mom, so he always walked slowly up to her and hugged her gently. Well, almost always. He talked to the baby in his Mom's stomach, cause maybe if he showed her that he liked it, his Mom would let him wear something other than a sailor suit. But, he promised God that if he'd just let his little brother or sister be all right and his Mom be happy, then he'd cheerfully wear the sailor outfit if his Mom asked him to.

Because he wanted his Mom to be happy.

She got really big as the months past and the baby got bigger. She put his hand on her stomach when it kicked, and he laughed with his Mom. Then one Sunday, she felt sick. His father wasn't home, and it was the maid's afternoon off. His Mom told him to call 911, because something wasn't right with the baby. He was scared, but he did it, and they said that they would come. He ran back to his Mom, and got even more scared. There was blood, and his Mom wouldn't wake up properly, and he knew that God hadn't kept his promise, and so Tony wouldn't either.

His father told Tony that he didn't have a little sister anymore. He was unhappy all the time, too, and Tony couldn't cheer him up. His father spent lots of time at the hospital with his Mom, and each time he'd come home looking tireder, and he wouldn't even want Tony to tell him about his day, but Tony heard him talking to one of his friends about how he hoped that she was getting better. His father didn't have to talk to Tony, if it meant that his Mom was getting better.

When his Mom came home, she was quiet and unhappy again. She yelled at him, even when he was as quiet as a mouse, and in the mornings she started drinking the drinks he wasn't allowed to touch. He didn't like talking to her when she was drinking them. His father started working more, and he yelled at Tony when Tony tried to tell him anything. When his Aunt and Uncle visited with their baby, his Mom refused to hold him. Tony could see that she wanted to, but she didn't. His father sat and drank downstairs, leaving his Mom to cry upstairs by herself.

Tony tried to cheer her up. He went into her room, and he hugged her tight, and she let him. He asked whether she could have another baby, so she wouldn't be sad anymore, and she hit him and then cried more.

He ran to his room, and the canopied bed, and sobbed. He just wanted his Mom to be happy again. He wanted his Mom back. He'd gladly have a little brother or sister taking all of his Mom's attention if she'd just be the way she was. But she wasn't.

And then that became the way she was.

His Mom had gone into hospital; his mother had come home.

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Tony had been working at NCIS for three weeks. He was still puzzling out the personalities of the people he was working with, and he wasn't holding out any hope that he'd be staying at this job for long. Gibbs wasn't giving him any indication of whether he really wanted Tony on his team or not, other then telling him to rewrite his reports multiple times. That was more likely a result of the fact that Gibbs was anal retentive than a reflection on Tony himself, or so Tony liked to think.

Where Tony could normally read people, he had trouble reading Gibbs. He'd think that he had him pegged, and then Gibbs would do something that completely blew what Tony had thought out of the water. It made working for him interesting...if not slightly harrowing.

His charm didn't seem to work on Gibbs, but then, it never did really work well on people once they knew him for more than a day. It hadn't worked on Gibbs at all. It didn't stop Tony from trying, though, and he'd hold out under Gibbs' stare for as long as he could, until he was so uncomfortable that he'd be forced to look away. There was one dominant personality on Gibbs' team, and Gibbs was it, there wasn't room for another.

Gibbs threw a file down on Tony's desk.

"What's this, Boss?" Tony looked from the file back up to Gibbs.

Gibbs powered off, leaving Tony staring at his back.

"Guess I'll just read it," Tony muttered to himself, opening the file.

Leanne Monet, eleven years old, missing for seven weeks. Shoulder length brown hair, brown eyes, glasses, serious looking. Daughter of Navy Captain Phil Monet and Claudia Monet, fraternal twin sister of Claire, older sister to brother Michael. Last seen leaving school, never made it home. Both parents had alibis; both were working and were vouched for by more than one person. Claire had stayed back at school for band practice, Michael was in daycare. Witnesses had reported seeing a man in his thirties, straight dark hair, around 6 foot, stocky build, near the school when she disappeared. There were also reports of a blue 1990s model sedan near the school in the weeks up to the disappearance. The man in the car never picked a child up, which had raised the suspicions of various parents before the disappearance. A white panel van had also been seen in the area at the time of the disappearance. Tony remembered hearing something about the case while he had been working in Baltimore, but it had quickly been overwhelmed by all the other cases he had been working on.

Statistically, the girl was dead. It came down to finding her body and the person or persons who had abducted and killed her. But if he had learned anything from Gibbs in the brief time he'd known him, it was to assume nothing. She could be part of the miniscule fraction that defies statistics.

It looked like everything that could have been done had been. And that sucked.

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Tony climbed carefully back in through his window, placing his hands on his bedside table so that he wouldn't slip. He'd done that, once, and while no-one had come running to find out what the noise was as he fell on the floor, he still didn't want to risk it. He closed the window, pulled off his coat, removed his boots, and changed out of his pyjamas into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

He padded quietly downstairs; not wanting to interrupt whatever morning meeting his father was involved in. He could hear raised voices coming from the living room, so he headed into the kitchen to get a glass of juice. Louisa had her back to him, so he went over to the fridge without saying anything. Louisa startled easily and Tony didn't want to risk her hurting herself somehow. The fridge made a rattling sound as he pulled it open and Louisa looked around to see who was there. There was a loud crash as the bowl she was holding dropped out of her suddenly lax hands onto the floor.

"Louisa," Tony said, unsure as to why she was so pale. He took a step forward as Louisa gasped and staggered slightly, reaching to grab her elbow. He heard running footsteps in the hall and his father's familiar tread as he skidded to a halt in the kitchen. "Dad, something's wrong with Louisa." He heard another gasp, behind him this time, as his hand was yanked away from Louisa and he was spun around and into a tight embrace. It took him a second to realise that the person shaking like a leaf and hugging him was his father. His father's grip tightened as his breath hitched slightly, and Tony was struggling to figure out what would make his father this upset, that he'd actually be affectionate to his son.

"Mr. DiNozzo," a voice came from somewhere behind his father, "I assume that's your son."

Tony could feel his father nodding and shuddering slightly. His father finally released him, stepping backwards but keeping his hands on Tony's shoulders. Tony stared into his damp eyes with puzzlement. "Dad, what's going on?"

"Where the hell were you?" his father asked, shaking Tony slightly with each word. Tony's stomach sank as he started to realise what had happened. The man standing behind his father, a policeman, stared at Tony intently. Tony started to get scared; he didn't want to get into trouble. "Tony, where were you?" his father yelled in his face.

"I was i-in my room," he finally stuttered out, not having prepared himself to actually tell the truth.

"Don't lie to me, Tony," his father said, his voice furious. "Do you know how much trouble you've caused? I called the police, because it was three in the morning and you weren't in your room. I thought that someone had taken you, I thought that someone was _hurting_ you. There's bad people out there, people who like to hurt little boys, people who might want to hurt me by hurting you. What the hell were you thinking?"

"I'm sor-sorry," Tony gasped out around the tears that were clogging his throat. His father's fingers were digging into his thin shoulders and the policeman was still looking at him. "I was at Sarah's, d-didn't mean to scare you, I was going to be home for br-breakfast, I didn't think you'd notice, I'm sorry, I'm sor-ry." He wheezed for breath as he finished, the tears pouring unchecked down his face. He wiped a hand across his nose, ashamed that he was twelve and bawling his eyes out in front of his father and a complete stranger, but unable to stop. His father slapped his hand, with an admonishment of, "Don't do that," before saying, "Who's Sarah?"

"My f-friend," Tony hiccupped, not understanding how his father couldn't know that. He'd told his father about Sarah. He hadn't told his father that he was spending every night at Sarah's, he actually _slept_ there, because he knew that his father would be angry. But, then, Sarah's parents didn't know he was staying there either, and they always wanted to know how he was doing at school. They'd probably be angry, too, because he was a boy and he was twelve. He didn't think of Sarah that way, though; she was his friend.

His father's face hardened, as if he was having similar thoughts. Tony pulled roughly away from the hand on his shoulder, repeating again, "She's my friend."

"Mr. DiNozzo," the policeman said. "Seeing as your son is okay, we'll leave you to it. I think he's learnt his lesson, haven't you, son?" The policeman looked almost kindly at Tony, who nodded in reply. He had learnt his lesson.

"I'm sorry that my son wasted your time," his father said tightly, letting go of Tony and following the policeman out of the kitchen. Tony stayed where he was, as his father's voice grew distant, knowing that he'd be in even bigger trouble if he moved an inch. Louisa moved to the kitchen door, checking the hallway, before rushing to Tony and pressing him against her chest in a bear hug. He stayed stiff in her arms, not allowing himself to relax. If he did, he wouldn't be prepared for the nightmare that was going to be his father's reaction, and he needed to be prepared, because it wasn't going to be pretty.

Three months later, Tony's father left him alone in the Maui Hilton, not noticing until he got the room service bill. When Tony finally saw him again, there were no hugs, shaking in shock and fear, or checking to see whether Tony was okay. Tony barely resisted saying, "There's bad people out there, people who like to hurt little boys, people who might want to hurt you by hurting me. What the hell were you thinking?"

He couldn't help but think that his father hadn't been scared for Tony before – he'd been hoping that Tony would stay away.

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Tony had been working at NCIS for six weeks when he met Claudia Monet. The woman walked out of the elevator and headed towards Tony and he instantly knew that it was Leanne's mother. There wasn't really a resemblance; they shared the same brown hair, the same build, but not much else.

The woman walked with a purpose, like putting one foot in front of another was the only thing that was keeping her going; if she stopped or faltered, her world that was held together with crazy glue would fall apart.

He'd seen women and men like her before. People who held so tight to the hope that everything would be all right in the end, that the truth that their mind couldn't deny _wasn't_ the truth, that their daughter would be found alive and well after being missing for ten weeks. The fragility and strength that came with such belief was what made him recognise her immediately, even though he'd never met her before.

She stopped in front of Gibbs' desk, seemingly lost as to what to do next, as he wasn't there.

Tony stood up, and moved out from behind his desk. "Mrs. Monet?" he said gently. She turned to face him, assessing him as to his relevance in discovering her daughter's fate. "My name is Special Agent DiNozzo. Agent Gibbs should be back shortly. Is there anything I can get for you, while you wait?"

The woman swallowed heavily before shaking her head, tears springing to her eyes, her words left unsaid but heard clearly.

_You can get my daughter back._

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"I don't know why he stopped taking his meds," the woman sobbed. Fifty years old and her twenty-two year old son was about to be killed.

He had taken three people hostage in a bookshop, so far gone in his psychosis that he thought that they were in league with the aliens who had taken over the government and were trying to kill him. They'd tried reasoning with him, but they worked for the government. His mother had talked to him, but the government had brainwashed her.

"Please don't kill my son."

What could Tony say to that? I'm sorry that we're going to have to kill your son? I wish we didn't have to, but those other three people are more valuable, more important than your son, because he doesn't know what he's doing and has a gun to their heads? It's too bad that he stopped taking his meds, but you all knew the risks?

"We're doing the best we can to get them all out safely, Mrs. Connor, including your son."

She looked at him despairingly, but with that tiny sliver of hope. Hope that what he was saying was true, hope that, by some miracle, her son would listen to somebody, hope that this was all a terrible nightmare and she'd wake to find her son medicated and well.

But, that wasn't going to happen. Matthew Connor was getting increasingly erratic: waving the gun around, threatening the hostages and signing off on his own execution. Tony knew that Matthew wasn't going to give up - he was too deep in his psychosis. He was as good as dead, and yet, Tony couldn't deny his mother the hope that it wasn't true. That her baby boy, her child, who she had washed and hugged and sent off into the big wide world that promised him so many opportunities, wasn't dead. That it somehow wasn't her fault.

He heard the call go over his earpiece and there was a single gunshot.

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It was Leanne and Claire Monet's twelfth birthday. But only Claire was having a party, and it was as much a party as it was a press conference. Claudia was hoping that maybe it would make whoever had taken Leanne guilty enough to go to the police, or phone in a tip, something that would tell her where her daughter was.

Millions of people got to watch as they struggled to hold it together for the cameras, as Claire blew out the candles on the cake that had birthday wishes for both her and Leanne written on it, as the family tried to make the day as much about Claire as it was about Leanne, but didn't really succeed.

Michael ran madly around their yard, fascinated by all the people there. Tony got the impression that he didn't understand why they were there; that his sister was starting to become someone he was told stories about, rather than a person he knew. He would never know Leanne; he was too young to be able to remember her when he grew up.

"Tony!" Michael called out exuberantly, crashing to a halt against Tony's legs.

"Heya, Mikey!" Tony said cheerfully to the boy, ignoring the sombreness of the occasion for the boy's sake.

"Pick me up!" The demand was emphasised with a pull on Tony's leg.

"Alrighty," Tony said, grunting and groaning with exaggeration as he picked Michael up. "Wow, you're getting big. You must have grown six feet since I last saw you."

Michael giggled and whispered in Tony's ear, "It's Claire's birthday today."

"I know," Tony whispered back.

"It's Leanne's too," Michael continued. "Daddy says Leanne's in heaven, and she can have chocolate cake any time she wants to."

Tony smiled sadly and placed a gentle kiss on the top of Michael's hair. "I'm sure she can."

"I want to go to heaven, too," Michael said. "I want chocolate cake all the time."

Tony cleared his throat. "But then your Mom and Dad and Claire would miss you, buddy, like they miss Leanne. You don't want that, do you?" His voice was husky.

Michael shook his head and buried his face against Tony's shoulder.

"Why don't we get some of that chocolate cake, huh?"

A week later, a tip led them to a burnt out blue Pontiac that had been dumped in the water in Henson Creek Park in Maryland. The first two letters of the license plate matched with what the witnesses thought they remembered.

Unfortunately, they could recover no evidence from the car indicating that Leanne Monet was ever in it.

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He'd hoped that Peter would get over it. Trying to solve homicides when your partner wished that you were elsewhere was very awkward. It also didn't help that Peter was expecting Tony to screw up - that inevitably meant that he would.

Tony had figured that he was being hazed when he first joined Baltimore Homicide. He looked too young, he had an attitude, and his partner had been solving homicides for longer than Tony had been in the police force. It stood to reason that Peter might have objected to being paired with him, but Tony had thought that he would get over it.

It's not like Tony needed the added stress. His father had been having heart problems and had gotten married again, his grandfather had died, Sheila, or maybe it was Sherry, had been stalking him, and, overall, it had been a pretty crappy time.

Tony had contemplated going to see Gee and telling him that he wanted out or a new partner after a month of putting up with Peter. The problem being that, with the number of times that Tony had transferred already and his attitude, Gee probably wouldn't be terribly impressed with or inclined to grant either request.

So, Tony had stuck it out for two years, through times when he was unsure whether Peter would have his back, times when it took all his restraint to not to put his gun to Peter's head or handcuff him to his desk, times when he drank and chased women to try and forget.

And Peter waited for him to slip up, to screw up on a grand enough scale that Gee would be forced to get rid of him. Peter's hope was enough to practically guarantee that it would happen.

It all reached a crescendo when they were assigned a new case: a prostitute and a sailor found shot dead in an alley. It looked to be loads of fun, what with the pissing contest with NCIS (not helped by both Peter and Tony's puzzled looks when the silver haired agent from the said agency announced its name), Peter deciding that his life sucked and therefore Tony's would suck more, and Tony's father's drunken phone calls in the middle of the pissing contest over the case.

When Tony had hung up on his father, again, he walked back over to the two men vying for the kill and told Agent Gibbs that he could have the sailor but they were keeping the prostitute. Peter glared at him murderously, while Gibbs looked unconcerned.

Four days later, Tony decked Peter in front of Agent Gibbs, fulfilling Peter's wish. Gibbs had smiled as Tony had cradled his aching knuckles, and walked away with his cell phone in his hand. Tony handed his resignation to Gee that evening and didn't look back.

Gibbs was waiting for him outside his apartment with a job offer.

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"Agent DiNozzo."

Tony turned from the filing cabinet. "Mrs. Monet. How are you doing?"

She smiled sadly. "About the same." She looked over to Kate's empty desk, before placing a gentle hand on his arm. "How are you?" she asked in a gentle voice.

Tony let his lips quirk into a half-smile and sat down on the edge of his desk. "I'm okay," he said. "Gibbs...well, Gibbs is Gibbs. He blames himself and McGee is taking it pretty hard."

"She seemed like a wonderful woman," Claudia said sympathetically.

Tony swallowed, holding back tears. "She was. I'm going to miss her."

They stayed silent for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts of the people who they had lost.

"I wanted to bring you this," Claudia finally said, pulling a folded piece of paper out of her bag. She handed it to Tony and he unfolded it. He took a few deep breaths, breathing through the shock, trying to restrain the tears burning at the corners of his eyes. A fifteen-year-old Leanne Monet stared out at him from the paper, her expression still serious, her glasses oval instead of round.

"If someone has seen her, they might recognise her from this. It's going to be on the news tonight. I didn't want you to be shocked if you saw it."

Claire had been talking for a while about getting an 'aged' version of Leanne to release to the media, but Tony hadn't expected her to actually do it. It meant that she was hoping that her daughter was still alive, which, after four years, was so unlikely that the odds were astronomical. He didn't know how she could sustain that hope for so long, that she could still believe that it could be true. He kept on thinking that she'd snap out of it, that she'd realise that what she was thinking was insane, but now he realised that she never would, not until she got to bury her daughter.

He didn't know how her family coped with it. Were Claire and Mikey second-class children to a dead child whose memory they could never live up to? He couldn't imagine how hard that would be. How would it feel to have one parent who so staunchly believed that their sister could be alive and the other taking the realistic view that she was dead? How screwed up were their kids going to be, constantly being reminded of what happened, constantly being reminded that there were bad people in the world that hurt little girls? How much strain could Claudia and Phil's marriage take before they fell apart, before he walked out? How much more could Claudia take, before she shattered completely and recognised that she was living a delusion?

Tony told her that Leanne would have been a beautiful girl and thanked her for giving him the copy. She rested her hand on his arm again, her eyes conveying the fact that she saw them as alike, that they were of the same kind now. She left and he didn't know how he could go on with the rest of the day.

He didn't turn on the news that evening. He didn't want to see a dead child's face masquerading as a missing girl.

Three weeks after Ziva joined the team, Tony dumped Leanne's file on her desk.

"What is this?" Ziva asked.

Tony slumped back in his seat and said, "Just read it."

Ziva studied the file for several seconds before saying, "She's been missing for four years. Other than someone discovering her body, there is never going to be a breakthrough in this case."

Tony nodded. "Read it anyway. You never know what a fresh set of eyes might find."

Ziva finished reading, and sat looking at the fifteen-year-old version of Leanne. "What makes her so special, that you are still investigating this, even now?"

Tony closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath before replying. "Nothing."

He could tell that Ziva didn't understand, and he hadn't expected her to.

Somewhere, someone deleted an email with the subject line: _Have you seen Leanne Monet?_


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